Poland's new right-wing government is driving its neighbours crazy

Andrzej
Duda, presidential candidate of the Law and Justice Party (PiS)
flashes Victory sign.REUTERS/Slawomir
Kaminski/Agencja Gazeta

Poland's new right-wing government is doing some pretty
outrageous things at the moment and it looks like they're about
to get in trouble with the Council of Europe.

The ruling Law and Justice party (PiS)
introduced a law earlier this month that
effectively gave them a lot more control of Poland's state
media.

The law is so questionable it is being investigated for
a possible breach of the European Commission's rule of
law mechanism — a framework for stopping EU governments
from becoming fascist states.

It's incredible to think that Poland, which has been seen as a
great example of a country that successfully transitioned to
democracy following the collapse of Communism, is in this
position. A lot has changed since the populist PiS won enough of
the vote in October last year to gain an outright majority in
Parliament in October.

The law that PiS passed is shocking. The new legislation
made it so that the treasury minister and not the National
Broadcasting Council could hire the managers and
supervisory board members of Poland’s public broadcasters. All
the current managers and board members
were fired as soon as the legislation went through.

The Council of Europe urged
Poland not to pass the law and is now using
its rule of law mechanism for the first time to assess
whether Poland is in breach of the EU's fundamental
values. This has led to angry exchanges between
Poland and various EU institutions and countries.

The Polish government are accusing everyone else of interfering
with its internal politics, while the European Commission argues
it is only doing its job.

In a press conference Frans
Timmermans, the First Vice President of the
European Commission, who came up with the idea for the rule of
law mechanism, claimed the
commission's actions had "nothing to do with politics
whatsoever."

"The internal politics of Poland don’t concern me, I don’t
know about it, I don’t want to know about it," he added. But he
then told reporters that the "binding rulings of the
constitutional court are not being respected" — which basically
means the European Commission trumps the
democratic decisions of your parliament.

It was the new media law that triggered the European
Commission into action, but PiS has been causing concern among
European technocrats ever since they were elected. The party
pushed through reforms
to the judiciary that will make it much harder for judges to
rule on the legality of government policies. They refused
to recognise the current judges in the
constitutional court, attempted to install five judges of their
own, and have now ensured it takes three to six
months for the court to reach a ruling instead of two
weeks.

Thousands
of backers of Poland's ruling conservative party are marching to
show their support for the policy amid a growing political
conflict, in Warsaw.AP Photo/Alik
Keplicz

The issue that EU institutions are struggling with is that PiS is
quickly pushing through these reforms on the back of a large
public mandate. They won
37.6 percent of the vote by winning over support
from older voters living in regions outside of the big
cities that have largely missed out on Poland's recent
economic growth, and young nationalist voters.

Despite their mandate, the German European Parliament
president Martin Schulz
called PiS' election a "coup." Poland's Defence Minister
Antoni Macierewicz responded by saying that he refused to
"take lessons in freedom and democracy" from
Germany.

This jibe at Germany is really telling. A lot of the surge
in Polish nationalism and mistrust of the German-dominated EU, is
rooted in a deep-seated suspicion of the Germans.

Polish Deputy Prime Minister Piotr Gliński
told a radio interviewer on Tuesday: "I think the
Germans haven’t squared accounts with us … Germany destroyed
Poland," while Kaczyński himself wrote in a
book "[Chancellor of Germany Angela] Merkel belongs to
a generation of German politicians who would like to reinstate
Germany’s imperial power."

These views have always existed in Poland, but until now had
remained largely hidden. On the surface, Merkel, who has a Polish
grandfather, has had a good relationship with Poland and senior
Polish figures such as former Prime Minister and
current president of the European Council Donald
Tusk.

Somehow the EU and Germany, its most powerful country, have
managed to ignore the anti-democratic sentiments lying under the
surface in Poland. They've been caught off guard by PiS and ended
up in a position where the European Commission is acting
undemocratically because they are investigating a democratically
elected government for acting undemocratically.

It's all very confusing.

Worryingly, this type of disagreement between the European
Council and an EU member state might be about to become common.
There has been a big increase in support for populist and
nationalistic
political parties across the EU and in the future, newly
elected government of EU countries may look very different to the
ones that were in place when they became EU member states.